The blame for CPD overtime should fall entirely on Lightfoot, Johnson, and J.B. Pritzker
If you want to know why Chicago’s police overtime budget keeps exploding like a defective Roman candle, don’t point fingers at the men and women on the street. Point them directly at the political geniuses who created this mess: Governor J.B. Pritzker, “Mayor 6.6 Approval Rating” Brandon Johnson, and his equally disastrous predecessor Lori Lightfoot. These are the architects of Chicago’s “defund the police, demonize law enforcement, incite ICE riots, obstruct federal justice, and undermine public safety” era. And now — shocking absolutely no one — they have the nerve to blame the police for the predictable consequences of their own policies.
Let’s be very clear about what’s happening here.
Chicago’s Police Department has not been on a shopping spree. They have not been joyriding through the overtime budget like drunken sailors with a city credit card. Officers have been plugging holes in a sinking ship, forced into 12-hour days, canceled days off, mandatory weekends, riot response, special event security, teen takeover triage, downtown chaos containment, and every other catastrophe cooked up by politicians who spent the last five years kneecapping the department and then wondering why it limps.
The Tribune accidentally told the truth
A recent Chicago Tribune editorial — written in unusually lucid form for the mainstream press — laid out the facts plainly, even if they stopped short of naming the real culprits. Over the last five years, CPD has blown past its overtime budget by more than $500 million. WTTW framed this as “allowing CPD to spend unlimited sums of taxpayer money,” as though the police have been throwing Ferraris and champagne parties on the public dime. Nonsense. The period in question was 2019–2024, otherwise known as the “Lightfoot–Johnson Fiscal Apocalypse.” These were the years when the city’s political leadership embraced every fad from “defund” to “reimagine public safety,” all while watching sworn officer counts fall off a cliff.
The Tribune noted CPD’s sworn headcount dropped by 1,700 officers between January 2019 and mid-2022. That is not a typo. Seventeen-hundred. A workforce collapse unprecedented in modern Chicago history, created by a mixture of hostile rhetoric, toxic working conditions, and political leadership treating police officers like enemies instead of public servants.
And when bodies disappear, guess what? Overtime goes up. Because the work doesn’t go away. Crime doesn’t go on holiday so politicians can posture. Someone has to answer 911 calls. Someone has to staff Lollapalooza, the NASCAR street race, the DNC, and every other event Chicago insists on hosting despite having fewer cops than at any point in recent history. Someone has to respond when downtown erupts in another teen takeover. Someone has to show up when activists launch another round of “protests” that mysteriously end in smashed windows, torched police cars, and officers being pelted with bricks.
Every one of those “someones” is an officer who already worked a full shift.
Overtime was not a luxury — it was survival
This wasn’t about cops “padding their hours.” As Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling himself noted during a recent hearing, there was “no way” to avoid overtime. “We’re a police department,” he said, stating the obvious. “Things happen.” Yes, especially in a city where leadership has spent years sabotaging the department’s ability to function normally.
Chicago didn’t go through normal times. It went through a near-biblical sequence of crises, each of which required massive police presence:
- A pandemic that shut the city down, reopened it unevenly, and produced social chaos.
- A historic surge in violent crime.
- Riots and “civil unrest” that politicians encouraged, excused, or refused to stop.
- ICE-obstructing mobs encouraged by local officials who prefer chaos to cooperation with federal law.
- Repeated citywide protests — some peaceful, many not.
- Teen takeovers and downtown disturbances practically scheduled like seasonal weather events.
- And just for fun: NASCAR, Lollapalooza, the Democratic National Convention, and other megaprojects requiring thousands of hours of extra manpower.
CPD had fewer officers than at any point in a generation, but politicians still expected the city to run normally. That’s how you end up with a half-billion dollars in overtime. Not because cops were lazy or greedy, but because the job doubled while the workforce shrank.
Blame the politicians who created the disaster
Let’s assign responsibility where it belongs:
Lori “Lightweight” Lightfoot
Lightfoot spent four years turning CPD into the enemy, slashing budgets, restricting tactics, micromanaging from a place of ignorance, and fostering a morale collapse so profound that officers retired or quit in record numbers. She presided over the single worst drop in sworn officers in modern Chicago history. Overtime didn’t explode despite her policies — it exploded because of them.
Brandon “Mayor 6.6” Johnson
This incompetent imbecile, a race-grifting tool of Stacy “The Notorious SDG” Davis-Gates who makes “Lightweight” Lightfoot look good, and may be the sole beneficiary of the travesty of New York’s suicidal election of the anti-Semitic, terrorist-supporting, communist mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, (because it makes him only the second worst mayor in the country), harbors legendary, visceral hostility toward the police. He considers Chicago’s finest a disease that must be eradicated. His administration has signaled repeatedly law enforcement is oppressive, criminals are victims, and federal immigration law should be resisted — even violently. He encouraged the very mobs that led to ICE-targeted riots and “solidarity protests,” all of which require massive police response. And now he pretends to be shocked — shocked! — CPD had to work overtime to clean up the mess he made.
J.B. Pritzker
The governor might be the only man in Illinois who could make Lightfoot look tough on public safety. His bizarre affection for criminal justice “reforms” like the SAFE-T Act, refusal to support law enforcement, and wink-and-nod relationship with anti-police activism helped create an ecosystem where criminals felt empowered and police felt abandoned. Higher crime equals more calls, which equals more overtime. This is arithmetic, not ideology.
Meanwhile, CPD payroll has been under budget
This is the part the press rarely mentions.
According to the Civic Federation, since 2019 (with the exception of 2024), CPD spent less on payroll than the city appropriated. In other words: Chicago budgeted for officers who did not exist.
This is one of the oldest tricks in political accounting. Underfund the actual workforce, count on vacancies you never fill, and then act outraged when overtime fills the gap you created.
The new overtime cap isn’t reform — it’s an admission of failure
The City Council recently imposed a $200 million cap on overtime. Snelling says he can live with it, but, admirably, he says overtime isn’t a dirty word. He’s right. Overtime is a tool — a necessary tool — when city leadership spends five years lighting the police department on fire.
But the cap isn’t about fiscal discipline. It’s about optics. It’s a way for the same politicians who caused the problem to pretend they’re now fixing it. They want credit for “reining in” CPD while ignoring the obvious: the simplest, cheapest, most ethical way to cut overtime is to hire more officers and support them so they don’t quit.
Will Johnson do that? Will Pritzker? Will the City Council? Will the activist class allow it?
Please.
They would rather blame the cops for showing up, at the expense of their quality of life and family relationships, than blame themselves for driving everyone else away.
These Democrats HATE cops. The stress that has driven too many of our police officers to suicide is just icing on their cake.
Superintendent Snelling deserves credit — real credit
Snelling is the first CPD leader in years who commands respect across political and community divides. He’s steady, competent, and credible. The Tribune is right to say Chicago has “every reason to trust him.” He inherited a department gutted by five years of ideological warfare, and he’s trying to steer it back toward reality.
But no superintendent — not Snelling, not anyone — can undo the damage caused by Lightfoot’s hostility, Johnson’s incompetence and cop hatred, and Pritzker’s cowardice.
The conclusion they don’t want you to hear
Chicago’s police overtime crisis has a simple explanation: Too few cops are forced to do too much work because politicians sacrificed public safety to their list for power, which led them to cater to the loony left.
Now those same politicians want to scapegoat the department they spent years weakening.
Don’t buy it. Don’t tolerate it. Don’t forget it.
Place the blame squarely where it belongs: Lori Lightfoot created the disaster, J.B. Pritzker supercharged it, and Brandon Johnson is determined to finish the job.
The officers just kept the city running.
If anything, we should be thanking them for the overtime — because without it, Chicago would have collapsed completely.
Vengeance is ours, Contrarions. Repay in kind. Send Johnson, Pritzker, and Boss Toni Preckwinle packing.
